The White Lie

by Andrea Gillies

  “Would you like to stay on for a while?” Ottilie asked her mother afterwards. She’d heard Edith on the phone, had picked up on her uncertainty in answering Pip’s queries about when she was returning home. Edith’s relief at being asked to stay on was absolute, and it was agreed she’d remain at the cottage until she felt stronger. Pip reassured her in his daily telephone calls that this was fine; it wasn’t even an issue: Mog and Joan had taken on the running of Peattie and so far it had all been remarkably amicable. Finally he confessed that he’d been calling from the house, having taken a second week’s compassionate leave. He didn’t care about the demotion that was certain to follow this, he said, as he was about to hand in his notice anyway.

  When Pip and Mog came to the cottage to see Edith the following weekend, Edith told them she didn’t want to return to Peattie to live.

  “What, not ever?” Mog was astonished.

  “This feeling will pass, at least it may pass,” Pip told her. “You need to give it time before making these big decisions.”

  “I don’t intend even to visit.”

  “You can’t mean for ever,” Mog said. “You can’t.”

  “It’s too early at any rate,” Pip told her soothingly. “What you need is to take some time.”

  “Not ever, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “It’s important we do talk about it, though.”

  “I don’t want ever to go back.”

  “But this is what happens when one’s bereaved,” Pip pointed out. “It’ll take time to readjust.”

  “I’m not going to; I hope not to,” Edith said. “Recovering, going back, adjusting. These would be a failure. Don’t wish that for me.” The realisation that she was continuing to live in her own unexplained version of life—that this was necessary—crossed her face, crossing her mind like an animal swift across a busy road, dodging traffic.

  Pip looked at Ottilie helplessly. “So she’s going to stay on with you for now?”

  “She’s going to live with me.”

  “Permanently?”

  “For as long as she wants. For now she says permanently.”

  “What will happen to Peattie?”

  “There are options that need to be talked about.”

  “Here’s what I’ve decided,” Edith was already saying. “Peattie can be sold—wait, don’t look like that, I haven’t finished—or you can take it on, you children. I’ve already spoken to your mother and she and Euan don’t want to, though she’d like to manage the gatehouse and the cottages. Redecorate them and manage them.”

  “George isn’t coming back?”

  “I spoke to him,” Ottilie said, “and he wants to stay at the care home, at least for now. He might go out to France when he feels stronger.”

  Jet had already moved into a flat in the town, to live with friends. Pip and Mog were itching to mention Ursula, what was going to happen about Ursula, but neither of them did so.

  Ottilie said, “While I have the three of you here together, I should say to you that I know about Alan; Dad told me what he said about Michael, about Michael surviving. It is of course nonsense and I don’t want to talk about it, actually, so we won’t, but I wanted you to know.” The others murmured their sympathy. “Please, no pity,” she begged. “I can’t.”

  “Oh, darling,” Edith said.

  “Mother. Please don’t. There’s really no need and I’d rather be practical. I’ll be fine about it. I don’t want to talk about it any more. Getting back to Peattie, and what’s to be done about Peattie. What do you think?” She turned her attention to Pip exclusively. “God knows where the money will come from. A hotel of some sort is the only paying way, I imagine.”

  “We’ve already given it some thought,” Pip said. “Angelica’s willing. We’ll consult with Mog, of course, Mog and the others.”

  “We’ll do as Dad wished,” Ottilie said, stacking the coffee cups. “We’ll lay Michael properly to rest and we’ll deal with whatever the consequences are, and then there will be the memory of Michael but there will no longer be the mystery of Michael, and that’s what I need.” She scraped cake from the tea plates. “I can’t tell you how much I need that.”

  Mog put her hand over Edith’s. “This is really what you want, to live here?”

  “Yes.” Edith’s face was full of melancholy.

  “Though we’re going to travel as much as we can for the next 12 months,” Ottilie added. “As much as we can afford.”

  “Where will you travel to?”

  “I have a few things planned. Morocco. The south of Spain. And then we’ll see.”

  They wouldn’t be going to France. Marseille had been planned but was now abandoned. Unsure of Alan’s location, the whole country had become saturated in threat. Not that anyone feared running into him: that would have been supernatural among coincidences, but George had been vague about where Alan had settled, saying he couldn’t remember the name of the town, and so it was instinctive with Edith and Ottilie to stay clear of France altogether. Alan had told George on the phone that he was in the Perigord.

  “People call this area the Dordogne, but really it’s the Perigord,” he’d said.

  This was information that George wouldn’t be passing on to anyone. Alan confided in his father just before he left: that secretly he was Michael’s father, that Henry had given him the money to buy the van, that the whole family knew the truth. Alan rings weekly from France, telling George a fund of funny stories about his new life as a gardener and handyman, his own boss at last. He omits, though, to describe the nights he spends at the café in the village, installing himself at his usual table in the corner just after six, sweaty from the day’s work in holiday house gardens. He’s acquired a reputation as a loudmouth, someone few people want to argue with, haunting the café till late, a pudgy, sun-pinked Ancient Mariner who stoppeth one in three, telling his tale over and over of how he fathered a boy out of wedlock, a boy born into a noble family.

  “One of the highest-ranking families in Scotland,” he says, tapping his nose, the sun blisters crusting on it.

  Ursula’s paid companion is a woman Susan Marriott recommended to Edith, an ex-foster mother of many difficult children. She comes in from the town every morning and goes home at night, after reporting each evening to Pip at the house. Ursula’s first repetitive enquiries about when her mother would come back were answered with the news that Edith was poorly—not seriously ill but too ill to come home. She needed somebody to look after her: Ursula understood this. She asks Edith every Saturday how she is and if she’s well enough yet to return, and Edith says not yet, but soon, she hopes it will be soon, feeling unable to do anything but tell a lie. The companion brings Ursula to the cottage, to the studio, once a week for tea at four o’clock. Ottilie is always present, because Edith says she can’t do it alone. My mother is lovely to Ursula. They never talk about what’s past. Instead, they make art together.

  The possibility of Edith’s return to Peattie is still spoken of as likely though no one really believes it. It will happen when she is ready, they say to each other. Thus far she hasn’t ever been ready and hasn’t returned. The things she wants are ferried out to her and the things she doesn’t want are ferried back. She has consigned Peattie to the past.

  “Don’t you want to visit Henry?” Pip asks her on the phone from time to time.

  “Henry’s here,” she tells him. “Henry’s with me wherever I go.”

  24

  Petra said that she would carry the shrimping net and the bucket, that they weighed nothing. Eager to be seen to be helpful, she went on to load herself up with the rest: the picnic bag, the rug that was rubberised on the back and the badminton set, zipped into its red vinyl cover. Ottilie took the rug and the picnic from her. She had her own canvas bag, her art bag, a purple one with a long handle that hooked across the body and was dotted with slogan-bearing badges. Joan took the sailing boat that Andrew had made for Sebastian, one hand placed at each end of it, pres
enting it held out slightly in front of her body. This was to be its maiden voyage.

  Sebastian insisted on walking at the front, because Henry had told him, perhaps too often, that all this land, all these buildings and trees, were his, would be his. It was Henry’s way of talking to him, of getting his attention: it was this big thing they had in common. Sebastian may have been the fourth of Edith and Henry’s children, but thanks to long-established precedent he was also sole heir to the estate. People recognised this, outsiders and neighbours recognised it, as well as family friends, as well as family members. Sebastian the little prince was treated with a kind of comprehending awe. Nobody called with congratulations when Ursula was born. Ursula had overheard some friends of Edith’s gossiping to this effect, and being inherently quick on the uptake, had asked her sisters why this was.

  “It’s because you’re only a girl,” Joan told her.

  “It was the same with us,” Ottilie added, her tone consoling. “That’s how it is with the Salters.”

  “Only boys count,” Joan clarified, somewhat brutally. “It was the same with Daddy,” Ottilie said. “He had three big sisters too.”

  “Only Daddy got given Peattie,” Joan added. “The sisters were thrown out to starve on the street.”

  “But Tilly lives here,” Ursula said, reasonably enough. “Only because she used to look after Granny. Actually, she’s a sort of servant.”

  “Joan, you go too far,” Ottilie reprimanded. “For heaven’s sake.”

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Why should it be Dad’s house and only Dad’s just because he’s a man?”

  “Joan.”

  “Well I think it was all wrong. They’d made their plans. They were going to live here together, open the hotel. Ursa was—what—20 when Daddy was born. But that didn’t count for anything. Whoosh. Everything was his. Instantly.”

  “Will you please just shut up.”

  ***

  Sebastian was stamping along at the front, his elbows raised and his knees lifting with every step of the march, raising the dust of the path, looking very small for a soldier in his red sandals, blue shorts, green windcheater. He was an adorable child, his doting mother said, his doting mother was always saying, day in and day out, unable to prevent herself from public and continual adoration. She’d look to his much older sisters for confirmation, for ratification. Her eyes shone with it, infatuated. Her hand kept going to his small blond head, and cupping his bottom, or encompassing the baby fat above his knees, squeezing its wobbly baby softness. He couldn’t run past her without Edith reaching and grabbing and making playful carnivorous noises as he struggled to be free. Sebastian Henry Salter was too mollycoddled, Henry said. Too mothered. He was turning into the sort of boy who cried if he got dirty or if you tried to lower him onto a pony. Henry worried that Sebastian was showing signs of effeminacy. Like Ottilie, he liked to draw. He loved books. That was all very well; drawing and reading were to be encouraged. But there had to be balance. Sebastian had asked for a doll for his birthday, and wanted to wear Ursula’s swimsuit, one with bows across the bodice, and had attempted to paint his toenails with polish of Joan’s. These were facts that Henry was incapable of being phlegmatic about.

  At four, Sebastian had babyish curls at his neck, wavy wispy curls that his mother insisted on keeping intact until he was old enough to go to school, when—and she could see Henry’s point—they might become a trigger for persecution. Sebastian’s name was down for an establishment a hundred miles south of here, where he was to be a weekly boarder because of the travelling. Until he turned seven the plan was that he be taught at home by Edith. The twins were at the local high school and were uncomplaining—quite the reverse: they’d said they’d hate to be sent away—but Ursula was about to start at the village primary and felt the differentiation from Sebastian keenly. Why couldn’t she stay at home and be taught by Mummy till she was older? Why not though? Why not really? Edith was asked again and again. Didn’t she want Ursula to be at home and learn with Sebastian? Edith’s explanations were unconvincing.

  Ursula was at the back of the procession, and dragging her feet. She had been instructed to hurry up, to hurry and catch up right now, but she dawdled along nonetheless, a picture of five-year-old non-compliance. Wearing clothes she despised, clothes that Edith had more or less to manhandle her into, red jeans and a striped sweater and strikingly small blue plimsolls, she stared morosely at the ground, scuffing her play shoes into the grit, until her dreaminess was interrupted by something big looming its shadow over her. Joan, her mouth pursed and her face determined, took Ursula’s hot little hand and began to pull her along, Ursula leaning back uncooperatively on the diagonal. At five she was already demonstrably highly strung. Battles were fought daily over many things. Her father had told her, in a fit of impatience he brooded over, that she was nothing but a thorn in his side, and Ursula wouldn’t forget this. Ursula doesn’t believe in people not meaning what they say. She has a phenomenal memory and remembers everything, even now, mentally filing and cataloguing all of it, every casually directed word. People said she was selfish, that she was stubborn, but from Ursula’s point of view that wasn’t it at all. It was other people, the way other people behaved, that made no sense. The question of fresh air, for instance. Why must she go out for a walk with Sebastian, and try to play badminton with Ottilie in a gale, when she could just as easily get the air from an open window? Grown-ups and sisters said that it wasn’t the same but they were not logical, a word that Grandpa Andrew, delighting in her precocious vocabulary, had taught her. She didn’t want to go to the loch. She wanted to be in the house, in her room alone with her things and a chair barricading the door. She thought fresh air was stupid. She thought her haircut was stupid. Her wavy hair, which had been pleasingly straggly until last week, uncut since her birth, had been shorn into a bob like her grandmother’s with the same long fringe, and after her bath Edith blow-dried it straight. Vita said it was darling but Ursula told her that she was stupid as well.

  When they arrived at the wood, Ottilie spread the picnic rug at the edge of the beach and put the picnic—a rudimentary one of crisps and warm fruit squash—propped in its bag against a tree root, though Sebastian raided it almost immediately. Ursula went off and sat on the plinth of the tomb, where the day before she had left a line of pink stones in a row. Sebastian took his snack to the water’s edge to watch Petra launching the boat. Petra suggested crisps as ideal boat cargo, and Sebastian went back to raid the bag a second time, whining that he needed Ursula’s crisps too, for the game. Joan couldn’t be bothered to argue. He enjoyed arranging the crisps, with accompanying commentary, arranging and rearranging them in the hold. Grandpa Andrew had made a huge amount of effort with the design of the boat, giving it living quarters whittled out inside the hatch and lots of little carved details.

  Joan wasn’t aware that she’d gone to sleep until she opened her eyes. When she woke, stiff and chilly on the rug, the breeze blowing her hair across her face, she couldn’t hear anything at first. The quiet was ominous. She raised her head from the shoulder, went up on her elbows and was relieved to see the others, shin-deep in water, quietly purposeful in the shallows, their shoes scattered on the beach; Ottilie, Sebastian, Petra. Ursula was standing on tiptoe not far away, scratching at the bark of a tree with a stone and singing one of her made-up songs. Seeing Joan watching, she stopped what she was doing and came across. Joan thought Ursula was going to speak to her but instead she went right past, to the tree root where Ottilie had stowed the picnic bag.

  “I’m afraid Sebastian took your crisps,” Joan told her. “Your drink’s there, though, if you want it.”

  Ursula ignored her. She pulled something light and pale-coloured, something folded up, out of the bag, and went back through the trees to where she’d come from.

  “What’s that, what have you got there?” Joan called after her, sitting up properly and paying attention. It was a length of old netting, thick and creamy French n
etting, the kind that Henry’s mother had decided should be installed at all the windows, blocking out the light. Sunlight was the enemy, fading the curtains and furnishings. It was the first thing Henry did when he inherited: he took the netting down. Once at at a safer distance, Ursula began wrapping the curtain netting carefully around herself with nimble hands. She pulled a long string of ivy from a tree, the ivy putting up only token resistance, coming away from the trunk in several small gasps, and wound this around the net costume, tying and tucking it. Joan, knowing better than to remonstrate, said nothing. When Ursula tried to meet her gaze, Joan pretended not to have seen her, pretended to be fascinated by one of the willows around the tomb. That’s what people were always advising, when Ursula was odd. “Pretend not to notice; that’s best.”

  Sebastian had eaten the second packet of crisps, taking them out of the hold one at a time and crunching on them. He told Petra she must find him something else, and so she went off obediently, smiling, finding his imperious tone amusing, looking for narrow stones and offering them with amused faux-humility as personnel for the Wind Ranger: that was the name of the boat, painted by Andrew in italic on the side. Once all the stones had been approved and put in place, Sebastian said he was bored. He got up and went and sat beside Ottilie on the jetty steps and began telling her a pirate story.